FOURTEEN
When I pressed the buzzer and walked unannounced through his unlatching door he was sitting alone in his office, shirt-sleeved behind his shiny black desk, reading the Flag.
He stood up slowly, his fingers spread on the paper as if to give himself leverage, a short solid man with authority carried easily, as of right.
I was not who he’d expected. A voice behind me was saying, ‘Here it is, Sam’, and a man came walking close, waving a folder.
‘Yes, Dan, just leave it with me, will you?’ Leggatt said, stretching out a hand and taking it. ‘I’ll get back to you.’
‘Oh? OK.’ The man Dan went away, looking at me curiously, closing the door with a click.
‘I got your message,’ I said.
He looked down at his copy of the Flag, turned a page, reversed the paper and pushed it towards me across the desk.
I read the Intimate Details that would be titillating a few million Friday breakfasts and saw that at least he’d played fair. The paragraph was in bold black type in a black-outlined box.
It said:
The Daily Flag acknowledges that the Newmarket racing stable of Robertson (Bobby) Allardeck (32) is a sound business and is not in debt to local traders. The Daily Flag apologises to Mr Allardeck for any inconvenience he may have suffered in consequence of reports to the contrary printed in this column earlier.
‘Well,’ he said, when I’d read.
‘Thank you.’
‘Bobby Allardeck should thank God for his brother-in-law.’
I looked at him in surprise, and I thought of Bobby’s schizophrenic untrustable regard for me, and of my sister, for whom I truly acted. That paragraph should at least settle the nerves of the town and the owners and put the stable back into functionable order: given, of course, that its uneasy underlying finances could be equally sorted out.
‘What changed your mind?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘You did. The lawyers said you would back down. I said you wouldn’t. They think they can intimidate anybody with their threats of long expensive lawsuits.’ He smiled twistedly. ‘I said you’d be real poisonous trouble if we didn’t print, and you would have been, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘I persuaded them we didn’t want Jay Erskine and Owen Watts in court, where you would put them.’
‘Particularly as Jay Erskine has a criminal record already.’
He was momentarily still. ‘Yes,’ he said.
It had been that one fact, I thought, that had swayed them.
‘Did Jay Erskine write the attacks on Bobby?’ I asked.
After a slight hesitation he nodded. ‘He wrote everything except the apology. I wrote that myself.’
He pressed a button on an intercom on his desk and said, ‘Fielding’s here’ neutrally to the general air.
‘Where are the credit cards, now we’ve printed?’ he asked.
‘You’ll get them tomorrow, after the newspapers have been delivered, like I said.’
‘You never let up, do you? Owen Watts has set off to Newmarket already and the others are in the post.’ He looked at me broodingly. ‘How did you find out about the bank?’
‘I thought you might try to discredit me. I put a stop on all ingoing payments.’
He compressed his mouth. ‘They can’t see what they’re dealing with,’ he said.
The buzzer on his door sounded and he pushed the release instantly. I turned and saw a man I didn’t know walking in with interest and no caution. Fairly tall, with a receding hairline over a pale forehead, he wore an ordinary dark suit with a brightly striped tie and had a habit of rubbing his fingers together, like a schoolmaster brushing off chalk.
‘David Morse, head of our legal department,’ said Sam Lcggatt briefly.
No one offered to shake hands. David Morse looked me over as an exhibit, up and down, gaze wandering over the unzipped anorak and the blue shirt and tie beneath.
‘The jockey,’ he said coolly. ‘The one making the fuss.’
I gave no reply, as none seemed useful, and through the open door behind him came another man who brought power with him like an aura and walked softly on the outsides of his feet. This one, as tall as the lawyer, had oiled dark hair, olive skin, a rounded chin, a small mouth and eyes like bright dark beads: also heavy shoulders and a flat stomach in smooth navy suiting. He was younger than either Sam Leggatt or Morse and was indefinably their boss.
‘I’m Nestor Pollgate,’ he announced, giving me a repeat of the Morse inspection and the same absence of greeting. ‘I am tired of your antics. You will return my journalists’ possessions immediately.’
His voice, like his body, was virile, reverberatingly bass in unaccented basic English.
‘Did you ask me here just for that?’ I said.
Don’t twist their tail, Rose Quince had said. Ah well.
Pollgate’s mouth contracted and he moved round to Legwatt’s side of the desk, and the lawyer also, so that they were ranged there in a row like a triumvirate of judges with myself before them, as it were on the carpet.
I had stood before the racing Disciplinary Stewards once or twice in that configuration, and I’d learned to let neither fright nor defiance show. Every bad experience, it seemed, could bring unexpected dividends. I stood without fidgeting and waited.
‘Your contention that we mounted a deliberate campaign to ruin your brother-in-law is rubbish,’ Pollgate said flatly. ‘If you utter that opinion in public we will sue you.’
‘You mounted a campaign to ruin Maynard Allardeck’s chance of a knighthood,’ I said. ‘You aimed to destroy his credibility and you didn’t give a damn who else you hurt in the process. Your paper was ruthlessly callous. It often is. I will utter that opinion as often as I care to.’
Pollgate perceptibly stiffened. The lawyer’s mouth opened a little and Leggatt looked on the verge of inner amusement.
‘Tell me why you wanted to wreck Maynard Allardeck,’ I said.
‘None of your business.’ Pollgate answered with the finality of a bank-vault door, and I acknowledged that if I ever found out it wouldn’t be by straightforward questions put to anyone in that room.
‘You judged,’ I said instead, ‘that a sideways swipe at Maynard would be most effective, and you decided to get at him through his son. You gave not a thought to the ruin you were bringing on the son. You used him. You should compensate him for that use.’
‘No,’ Pollgate said.
‘We admit nothing,’ the lawyer said. A classically lawyerlike phrase. We may be guilty but we’ll never say so. He went on, ‘If you persist in trying to extort money by menaces, the Daily Flag will have you arrested and charged.’
I listened not so much to the words as to the voice, knowing I’d heard it somewhere recently, sorting out the distinctive high pitch and the precision of consonants and the lack of belief in any intelligence I might have.
‘Do you live in Hampstead?’ I said thoughtfully.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Pollgate said, coldly impatient.
‘Three thousand before, ten after.’
‘You’re talking gibberish,’ Pollgate said.
I shook my head. David Morse was looking as if he’d bitten a wasp.
‘You were clumsy,’ I said to him. ‘You don’t know the first thing about bribing a jockey.’
‘What is the first thing?’ Sam Leggatt asked.
I almost smiled. ‘The name of the horse.’
‘You admit you take bribes, then,’ Morse said defensively.
‘No I don’t, but I’ve been propositioned now and then, and you didn’t sound right. Also you were recording your offer on tape. I heard you start the machine. True would-be corrupters wouldn’t do that.’
‘I did advise caution,’ Sam Leggatt said mildly.
‘You’ve no proof of any of this,’ Pollgate said with finality.
‘My bank manager’s holding a three thousand pound draft issued in the City. He intends on my behalf to ask questions about its origins.’
‘He’ll get nowhere,’ Pollgate said positively.
‘Then perhaps he’ll do what I asked him first, which is to tear it up.’
There was a short stark silence. If they asked for the draft back they would admit they’d delivered it, and if they didn’t, their failed ploy would have cost them the money.
‘Or it could be transferred to Bobby Allardeck, as a first small instalment of compensation.’
‘I’ve heard enough,’ Pollgate said brusquely. ‘Return the property of our journalists immediately. There will be no compensation, do you understand? None. You will come to wish, I promise you, that you had never tried to extort it.’
Under the civilised suiting he hunched his shoulders like a boxer, rotating them as a physical warning of an imminent onslaught, a flexing of literal muscles before an explosion of mental aggression. I saw in his face all the brutality of his newspaper and also the arrogance of absolute power. No one, I thought, could have defied him for too long, and he didn’t intend that I should be an exception.
‘If you make trouble for us in the courts,’ he said grittily, ‘I’ll smash you. I mean it. I’ll see to it that you yourself are accused of some crime that you’ll hate, and I’ll get you convicted and sent to prison, and you’ll go down, I promise you, dishonoured and reviled, with maximum publicity and disgrace.’
The final words were savagely biting, the intention vibratingly real.
Both Leggatt and Morse looked impassive and I wondered what any of them could read on my own face. Show no fright… ye gods.
He surely wouldn’t do it, I thought wildly. The threat must be only to deter. Surely a man in his position wouldn’t risk his own status to frame and jail an adversary who wanted so little, who represented no life-or-death danger to his paper or to himself, who wielded no corporate power.
All the same, it looked horrible. Jockeys were eternally vulnerable to accusations of dishonesty and it took little to disillusion a cynical public. The assumption of guilt would be strong. He could try harder and more subtly to frame me for taking bribes, and certainly for things worse. What his paper had already set their hand to, they could do again and more thoroughly. A crime I would hate.
I could find no immediate words to reply to him, and while I stood there in the lengthening silence the door alarm buzzed fiercely, making Morse jump.
Sam Leggatt flicked a switch. ‘Who is it?’ he said.
‘Erskine.’
Leggatt looked at Pollgate, who nodded. Leggatt pressed the button that unlatched the door, and the man I’d shaken off the ladder came quietly in.
He was of about my height, reddish haired going bald, with a drooping moustache and chillingly unsmiling eyes. He nodded to the triumvirate as if he’d been talking to them earlier and turned to face me directly, chin tucked in, stomach thrust out, a man with a ruined life behind him and a present mind full of malice.
‘You’ll give me my stuff,’ he said. Not a question, not a statement: more a threat.
‘Eventually,’ I said.
There was a certain quality of stillness, of stiffening, on the far side of Leggatt’s desk. I looked at Pollgate’s thunderous expression and realised that I had almost without intending it told him with that one word that his threat, his promise, hadn’t immediately worked.
‘He’s yours, Jay,’ he said thickly.
I didn’t have time to wonder what he meant. Jay Erskine caught hold of my right wrist and twisted my arm behind my back with a strength and speed that spoke of practice. I had done much the same to him in Bobby’s garden, pressing his face into the mud, and into my ear with the satisfaction of an account paid he said, ‘You tell me where my gear is or I’ll break your shoulder so bad you’ll ride no more races this side of Doomsday.’
His vigour hurt. I checked the three watching faces. No surprise, not even from the lawyer. Was this, I wondered fleetingly, a normal course of events in the editor’s office of the Daily Flag?
‘Tell me,’ Erskine said, shoving.
I took a sharp half-pace backwards, cannoning into him. I went down in a crouch, head nearly to the floor, then straightened my legs with the fiercest possible jerk, pitching Jay Erskine bodily forwards over my shoulders, where he let go of my wrist and sailed sprawlingly into the air. He landed with a crash on a potted palm against the far wall while I completed the rolling somersault and ended upright on my feet. The manoeuvre took a scant second in the execution: the stunned silence afterwards lasted at least twice as long.
Jay Erskine furiously tore a leaf from his mouth and struggled pugnaciously to right himself, almost pawing the carpet like a bull for a second charge.
‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘That’s bloody enough.’
1 looked directly at Nestor Pollgate. ‘Compensation,’ I said. ‘Another of your banker’s drafts. One hundred thousand pounds. Tomorrow. Bobby Allardeck will be coming to Ascot races. You can give it to him there. It could cost you about that much to manufacture a crime I didn’t commit and have me convicted. Why not save yourself the trouble.’
Jay Erskine was upright and looking utterly malignant.
I said to him, ‘Pray the compensation’s paid… Do you want another dose of the slammer?’
I walked to the door and looked briefly back. Pollgate, Leggatt and Morse had wiped-slate faces: Jay Erskine’s was glitteringly cold.
I wondered fearfully for a second if the door’s unlatching mechanism also locked and would keep me in; but it seemed not. The handle turned easily, came smoothly towards me, opening the path of escape.
Out of the office, along the passage to the lifts my feet felt alarmingly detached from my legs. If I believed Pollgate’s threats I was walking into the bleakest of futures: if I believed Erskine’s malevolence it would be violent and soon. Why in God’s name, I thought despairingly, hadn’t I given in, given them the jackets, let Bobby go bust.
There were running footsteps behind me across the mock-marble hallway outside the lifts, and I turned fast, expecting Erskine and danger, but finding, as once before, Sam Leggatt.
His eyes widened at the speed with which I’d faced him.
‘You expected another attack,’ he said.
‘Mm.’
‘I’ll come down with you.’ He pressed the button for descent and stared at me for a while without speaking while we waited.
‘One hundred thousand,’ he said finally, ‘is too much. I thought you meant less.’
‘Yesterday, I did.’
‘And today?’
‘Today I met Pollgate. He would sneer at a small demand. He doesn’t think in peanuts.’
Sam Leggatt went back to staring, blinking his sandy lashes, not showing his unspoken thoughts.
‘That threat,’ I said slowly, ‘about sending me to prison. Has he used that before?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘On someone else.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘You and your lawyer,’ I said, ‘showed no surprise.’
The lift purred to a halt inside the shaft and the doors opened. Leggatt and I stepped inside.
‘Also,’ I said, as the doors closed, ‘the words he used sounded almost rehearsed. “You’ll go down, I promise you, dishonoured and reviled, with maximum publicity and disgrace.” Like a play, don’t you think?’
He said curiously, ‘You remember the exact words?’
‘One wouldn’t easily forget them.’ I paused. ‘Did he mean it?’
‘Probably.’
‘What happened before?’
‘He wasn’t put to the test.’
‘Do you mean, the threat worked?’ I asked.
‘Twice.’
‘Jesus,’ I said.
I absent-mindedly rubbed my right shoulder, digging in under the anorak with the left thumb and fingers to massage. ‘Does he always get his way by threats?’
Leggatt said evenly, ‘The threats vary to suit the circumstances. Does that hurt?’
‘What?’
‘Your shoulder.’
‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so. Not much. No worse than a fall.’
‘How did you do that? Fling him off you, like that?’
I half grinned. ‘I haven’t done it since I was about fifteen, same as the other guy. I wasn’t sure it would work with a grown man, but it did, a treat.’
We reached the ground floor and stepped out of the lift.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asked casually.
‘With a friend,’ I said.
He came with me halfway across the ornate entrance hall, scopping beside the small fountain.
‘Why did Nestor Pollgate want to crunch Maynard Allardeck?’ I said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then it wasn’t your idea or Erskine’s? It came from the top?’
‘From the top.’
‘And beyond,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
I frowned. ‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘As far as I know, Nestor Pollgate started it.’
I said ruefully, ‘Then I didn’t exactly smash his face in.’
‘Not far off.’
There was no shade of disloyalty in his voice, but I had the impression that he was in some way apologising: the chief’s sworn lieutenant offering comfort to the outcast. The chief’s man, I thought. Remember it.
‘What do you plan to do next?’ he said.
‘Ride at Ascot.’
He looked steadily into my eyes and I looked right back. I might have liked him, I thought, if he’d steered any other ship.
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
He seemed to hesitate a fraction but in the end said merely, ‘Goodbye’ and turned back to the lifts: and I went out into Fleet Street and breathed great gulps of free air under the stars.
I walked the two miles back to the hotel and sat in my room for a while there contemplating the walls, and then I went down to find the rented Mercedes in the underground park and drove it out to Chiswick.
‘You’re incredibly early,’ Danielle said, faintly alarmed at my arrival. ‘I did say two a.m., not half after eleven.’
‘I thought I might just sit here and watch you, as no one seemed to mind me being here last time.’
‘You’ll be bored crazy.’
‘No.’
‘OK.’
She pointed to a desk and chair close to hers. ‘No one’s using that tonight. You’ll be all right there. Did you get that cut fixed?’
‘Yes, it’s fine.’
I sat in the chair and listened to the mysteries of newsgathering, American style, for the folks back home. The big six-thirty evening slot, eastern US time, was being aired at that moment, it appeared. The day’s major hassle had just ended. From now until two, Danielle said, she would be working on anything new and urgent which might make the eleven o’clock news back home, but would otherwise be on the screens at breakfast.
‘Does much news happen here at this time of night?’ I asked.
‘Right now we’ve got an out-of-control fire in an oil terminal in Scotland and at midnight Devil-Boy goes on stage at a royal charity gala to unveil a new smash.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Never mind. A billion teenagers can’t be wrong.’
‘And then what?’ I said.
‘After we get the pictures? Transmit them back here from a mobile van, edit them, and transmit the finished article to the studios in New York. Sometimes at midday here we do live interviews, mostly for the seven-to-nine morning show back home, but nothing live at nights.’
‘You do edit the tapes here?’
‘Sure. Usually. Want to see?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘After I’ve made these calls.’ She gestured to the telephone and I nodded, and subsequently listened to her talking to someone at the fire.
The talent is on his way back by helicopter from the race riot and should be with you in ten minutes. Get him to call me when he can. How close to the blaze are you? OK, when Cervano gets to you try to go closer, from that distance a volcano would look like a sparkler. OK, tell him to call me when he’s reached you. Yeah, OK, get him to call me.’
She put down the receiver, grimacing. ‘They’re a good mile off. They might as well be in Brooklyn.’
‘Who’s the talent?’ I said.
‘Ed Cervano. Oh… the talent is any person behind a microphone talking to the camera. News reporter, anchor, anyone.’
She looked along the headings on the board on the wall behind her chair. ‘Slug. That’s the story we’re working on. Oil fire. Devil-Boy. Embassy. So on.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Locations, obvious. Time, obvious. Crew. That’s the camera crew which is allocated to that story, and also the talent. Format, that’s how fully we’re covering a story. Package means the works, camera crew, talent, interviews, the lot. Voice-over is just a cameraman, with the commentary tagged on later. So on.’
‘And it’s you who decides who goes where for what?’
She half nodded. ‘The bureau chief, and the other coordinators, who work in the daytime, and me, yes.’
‘Some job,’ I said.
She smiled with her eyes. ‘If we do well, the company’s ratings go up. If we do badly, we get fired.’
‘The news is the news, surely,’ I said.
‘Oh yes? Which would you prefer, an oil fire from a mile off or to think you feel the flames?’
‘Mm.’
Her telephone rang. ‘News,’ she said, and listened. ‘Look,’ she said, sounding exasperated, ‘if he’s late, it’s news. If he’s sick, it’s news. If he doesn’t make it on to the stage at a royal gala, it’s news. You just stay there, whatever happens is news, OK? Get some shots of royalty leaving, if all else fails.’ She put down the receiver. ‘Devil-Boy hasn’t arrived at the theatre and it takes him a good hour to dress.’
‘The joys of the non-event.’
‘I don’t want to be scooped by one of the other broadcasting companies, now do I?’
‘Where do you get the news from in the first place?’
‘Oh… the press agencies, newspapers, police broadcasts, publicity releases, things like that.’
‘I guess I never wondered before how the news arrived on the box.’
‘Ten seconds’ worth can take all day to gather.’
Her telephone rang again, with the helicoptering Ed Cervano now down to earth at the other end. Danielle asked him in gentle tones to go get himself a first degree burn, and from her smile it seemed he was willing to go up in flames entirely for her sake.
‘A sweet-talking guy,’ she said, putting down the receiver. ‘And he writes like a poet.’ Her eyes were shining over the talent’s talents, her mouth curving from his honey.
‘Writes?’ I said.
‘Writes what he says on the news. All our news reporters write their own stuff.’
Another message came through from the royal gala: DevilBoy, horns and all, was reported on his way to the theatre in a bell-ringing ambulance.
‘Is he sick?’ Danielle asked. ‘If it’s a stunt, make sure you catch it.’ She disconnected, shrugging resignedly. ‘The hip-wriggling imp of Satan will get double the oil fire exposure. Real hell stands no chance against the fake. Do you want to see the editing rooms?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and followed her across the large office and down a passage, admiring the neatness of her walk and wanting to put my hands deep into her cloud of dark hair, wanting to kiss her, wanting quite fiercely to take her to bed.
She said, ‘I’ll show you the studio first, it’s more interesting’, and veered down a secondary passage towards a door warningly marked ‘If red light shows, do not enter’. No red light shone. We went in. The room was moderate in size, furnished barely with a couple of armchairs, a coffee table, a television camera, a television set, a teleprompter and a silent coffee machine with paper cups. The only surprise was the window, through which one could see a stretch of the Thames and Hammersmith Bridge, all decked with lights and busily living.
We do live interviews in here in front of the window,’ Danielle said. ‘Mostly politicians but also actors, authors, sportsmen, anyone in the news. Red buses go across the bridge in the background. It’s impressive.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
She gave me a swift look. ‘Am I boring you?’
‘Absolutely not.’
She wore pink lipstick and had eyebrows like wings. Dark smiling eyes, creamy skin, long neck to hidden breasts like apples on a slender stem… For Christ’s sake, Kit, I thought, drag your mind off it and ask some sensible questions.
‘How does your stuff get from here to America?’ I said.
‘From in here.’ She walked over to a closed door in one of the walls, and opened it. Beyond it was another room, much smaller, dimly lit, which was warm and hummed faintly with walls of machines.
‘This is the transmitter room,’ she said. ‘Everything goes from in here by satellite, but don’t ask me how, we have a man with a haunted expression twiddling the knobs and we leave it to him.’
She closed the transmitter room door and we went through the studio, into the passage and back to the editing rooms, of which there were three.
‘OK,’ she said, switching a light on and revealing a small area walled on one side by three television screens, several video recorders and racks of tape cassettes, ‘this is what we still use, though I’m told there’s a load of new technology round the corner. Our guys here like these machines, so I guess we’ll have them around for a while yet.’
‘How do they work?’ I asked.
‘You run the unedited tape through on the left-hand screen and pick out the best bits, then you record just those on to the second tape, showing on the second screen. You can switch it all around until it looks good and you get a good feeling. We transmit it like that, but New York often cuts it shorter. Depends how much else they’ve got to fit in.’
‘Can you work these machines yourself?’ I asked.
‘I’m slow. If you really want to know now, you can watch Joe later when we get the oil fire and Devil-Boy tapes – he’s one of the best.’
‘Great,’ I said.
‘I’m surprised you’re so interested.’
‘Well, I’ve some tapes I want to edit myself. It would be nice to learn how.’
‘Is that why you came here so early?’ She sounded as if I might say yes without at all offending her.
I said, ‘Partly. Mostly to see you… and what you do.’
She was close enough to hug and I had no insight at all into what she was thinking. A brick wall between minds. Disconcerting.
She looked with friendliness but nothing else into my face, and the only thing I was sure of was that she didn’t feel as I did about a little uninhibited love-making on the spot.
She asked if I would like to see the library and I said yes please: and the library turned out to be not books but rows and rows of recorded tapes, past years of news stories forgotten but waiting like bombs in the dark, records of things said, undeniable.
‘Mostly used for obituaries,’ Danielle said. ‘Reactivated scandals. Things like that.’
We returned to her news desk, where over the next hour I sat and listened to the progress of events. (Devil-Boy had arrived at the stage door, fit, well and fully made-up in a blaze of technicolor lights to the gratified hysterics of a streetful of fans) and met Danielle’s working companions, the bureau chief, Joe the editor, the gaunt transmitter expert, two spare cameramen and a bored and unallocated female talent. About sixty people altogether worked for the bureau, Danielle said, but of course never all at one time. The day shift, from ten to six-thirty, was much bigger: in the daytime there were two to do her job.
At one o’clock Ed Cervano telephoned to say they’d gotten a whole load of spectacular shots of the oil fire but the blaze was now under control and the story was as dead as tomorrow’s ashes.
‘Bring back the tapes anyway,’ Danielle said. ‘We don’t have any oil fire stock shots in the library.’
She put down the receiver resignedly. ‘So it goes.’
The crew from the royal gala returned noisily bearing Devil-Boy’s capers themselves, and at the same time a delivery man brought a stock of morning newspapers to put on Danielle’s desk for her to look through for possible stories. The Daily Flag, as it happened, lay on top, and I opened it at Intimate Details to re-read Leggatt’s words.
‘What are you looking at?’ Danielle asked.
I pointed. She read the apology and blinked.
‘I didn’t think you stood a chance,’ she said frankly. ‘Did they agree to the compensation also?’
‘Not so far.’
‘They’ll have to,’ she said. ‘They’ve practically admitted liability.’
I shook my head. ‘British courts don’t award huge damages for libel. It’s doubtful whether Bobby would actually win if he sued, and even if he won, unless the Flag was ordered to pay his costs, which also isn’t certain, he simply couldn’t afford the lawyers’ fees.’
She gazed at me. ‘Back home you don’t pay the lawyers unless you win. Then the lawyers take their slice of the damages. Forty per cent, sometimes.’
‘It’s not like that here.’
Here, I thought numbly, one bargained with threats. On the one side: I’ll get your wrist slapped by the Press Council, I‘II get questions asked in Parliament, I’ll see your ex-convict journalist back in the dock. And on the other, I’ll slice your tendons, I’ll lose you your jockey’s licence for taking bribes, I’ll put you in prison. Reviled, dishonoured, and with publicity, disgraced.
Catch me first, I thought.